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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, October 20, 2007
Making the Punishment Fit the Crime Here's a news story about gun self-defense where the victims went one better than just taking the burglar into custody. From October 19, 2007 Associated Press: A burglar in Montgomery chose the wrong family to mess with, literally. Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned home on Tuesday after a week away to find that thieves had emptied almost everything the family of five owned, Tiffany McKinnon said through tears.I was burglarized once in California. The burglar really didn't make much of a mess, but I felt terribly, terribly violated nonetheless. More typically, burglars are in a big hurry to find valuables and aren't very careful about how they search for them. This tendency to leave huge messes may also reflect the chemically altered state of the burglars. A fair number of burglars are intoxicated, probably because it reduces inhibitions enough for them to engage in what is, after all, a pretty risky behavior. I remember reading in the early 1980s about a study of heroin addicts in Baltimore that discovered that they were disproportionately committing burglaries and robberies after they had shot up--rather than when they were desperate for a fix. One of my wife's classmates in high school was beaten to death with a roofing hammer by two burglars. They were high on heroin, and had already raped and murdered his little sister, who got home earlier. There is also sometimes an element of intimidation. I've read of burglars defecating in the middle of the living room as a way of telling the victims, "I'm not afraid. And I can do with your property as I wish." I sometimes suspect that the burglar who broke into my apartment in Santa Monica may have a similar motivation for making a corned beef sandwich while he was there--just to let me know that he had the time and was sufficiently unafraid to do so. Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Lack of Activity Here Sorry, but I am assisting in preparation of amicus briefs for the D.C. case. I'm weaponizing the research that I did for my last book, Armed America. (Yes, just like weaponizing uranium, I'm concentrating it and refining it until you can't put it too close together.) I'm also doing some original research that is beginning to produce WMDs of Second Amendment legal arguments--stuff that is more devastating than has been used in legal or intellectual warfare before. For obvious reasons, I can't tell you about it--we need to keep everything holstered and discreet until the last minute. Labels: gun history Wednesday, October 17, 2007
More Bad News From Iraq Instapundit calls this October 16, 2007 McClathy Newspapers article "really stretching for the negative spin". I agree: A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.I'm reminded of several years ago when some clever guy suggested that if the Bush Administration found a cure for cancer, the headline in the New York Times would be: "Bush Administration Policies Will Put Doctors Out of Work." Labels: terrorism Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Remember When Democrats Decried Bush's Unpopularity Abroad? They are in control of Congress--and making the U.S. very unpopular abroad. Gateway Pundit has the details. Sunday, October 14, 2007
Painful Networking Lessons The home network suddenly stopped working this evening--and the symptom was that no one could see workgroup MSHOME. After much suffering, it turned out to be that Norton Protection Center's Firewall (rather than Microsoft's Firewall) "learns"--and somehow learned to disable all file sharing requests from within the network. The solution is to add all IP addresses in your local network to the list of allowed accesses. Today's Humility Lesson I mentioned a couple of days ago my irritation at a claim that there was no Pennsylvania militia until two years into the war. Professor Nathan Kozuskanich has now responded by digging through the records, and finding that the 1757 militia law, after many roundabouts with the governor, was only in effect for a couple of years, so indeed, there would appear not to have been a formal militia law in effect when the Revolution started. This still doesn't explain why official documents refer to soldiers in 1776 who are members of the "Pennsylvania Militia" and why members of the Associations were treated like militia by the Revolutionary government. It appears that Professor Kozuskanich might be technically correct that there was no militia statute in effect at the time--although functionally, the Associators were operating like militia. This doesn't solve the problems of his interpretation of the Pennsylvania Constitution's "bear arms" provision (sec. 13) as though it was a part of the religiously scrupulous militia clause (sec. 8). Labels: history Redefining Cruel & Unusual Punishment Professor Volokh points to a recent federal court decision that held that requiring Los Angeles County jail inmates to sleep on mattresses on the floor violates the cruel and unusual punishment prohibition of the Eighth Amendment: Interestingly, though, the finding wasn't based on a conclusion that such a practice caused unacceptable physical discomfort, or hygiene problems. Rather, it seems that the court thought that requiring people to sleep on mattresses (presumably with adequate other bedding) rather than on bunks was just an unacceptable indignity....Hmmm. I'm sleeping on a mattress on the floor right now, mostly because we just have never gotten around to replacing the bedframe that we scrapped when we moved up here. To be fair, some of the comments point out that the mattresses used in many jails are closer to wrestling mats than regular mattresses, and at least one person suggests that the decision is using the mattress on the floor indignity as a proxy for something else: I think the point is more about packing prisoners together rather than the presence or absence of bunks. Putting prisoners, often violent people made more so by being locked with a bunch of other violent people in too small a place, together, is just a recipe for violence and all kinds of abuses, physical, sexual, psychological... This is particularly true in California, and especially in LA, where prison overcrowding has become a sickening disgrace.The problem really isn't that the mattresses are on the floor. If the real issue is overcrowding, the judge needed to say that. I would agree that at a certain level of overcrowding, a jail (which remember includes a lot of people who have been convicted of nothing, and may never be convicted) does qualify as "cruel and unusual punishment." But at what level a jail crosses the line from "unpleasantly crowded" to "cruel and unusual punishment" isn't a bright line decision, where "mattress on the floor" is. Everyone has a solution to jail overcrowding. The drug legalization crowd wants all the drug laws repealed, which would certainly reduce the number of drug offenders in jail...but likely with some increase in the number of people in jail for driving under the influence, murder, rape, child abuse. We might have a net decline in the jail populations, but I wouldn't bet that the reduction is going to suddenly fix jail overcrowding, nor would I bet much money that the net reduction would last more than a few months. If there are no serious consequences to meth addiction, at least some small percentage of the population that might stay away from it will start using it, become addicted, and become next year's murder suspect. I would like to see a lot more use of house arrest for first offender, non-violent offenses. It was rather sad to be living in California and discover that my state was falling behind the compassionate and progressive states on this matter...like Georgia. |
